CPU Hyperthreading for Programmers?

[Mini Hep]

I am currently building a new system which will be used for gaming, and game programming,maybe a little bit of game art as well. Not just play around game programming either as I was recently accepted in to a degree course that focuses on the subject.

I was wondering if programmers benefit from hyper-threading at all, as this will determine my decision to go with an i7 3770K over an i5 3570K?

Again any help is appreciated!

PS. Don't know if I should've put the thread in this category or not, just went with what i thought was best.

 

[Bulldog13]

For your purposes, it doesn't matter. I would just go with the cheaper one.

 

[Cogman]

Compile times will be slightly reduced, other than that, not really. TBH, you will see a much greater benefit from an SSD (if you don't already have one).

 

[Bulldog13]

Compile times will be slightly reduced, other than that, not really. TBH, you will see a much greater benefit from an SSD (if you don't already have one).

SSD is the ticket, makes programming much better.

 

[BrightCandle]

Depending on language you can see about 20-30% extra performance in compilation and highly parallel computation tasks in games. Hyperthreading can make a difference as the workload of compilation as it has a lot of branches in it.

An SSD also helps because we tend to do a lot of small file reads and writes. But I have found with C, Java and especially Scala that I am very CPU limited once you have an SSD.

 

[Merad]

An SSD also helps because we tend to do a lot of small file reads and writes. But I have found with C, Java and especially Scala that I am very CPU limited once you have an SSD.

Depends on your toolset as well. I tend to use Netbeans for Java, and it does auto-compile on save, so there's little benefit unless you do a full rebuild of your project. Edit: Assuming that Netbeans even does multithread compiles... I've never checked.

For C & C++, at least on MSVC by default it only uses one core for compilation. The multithread compile option requires you to turn off minimal rebuild and precompiled headers, so it isn't necessarily better.

 

[postmortemIA]

SSD is the ticket, makes programming much better.

maybe, but my i7 compiles 30% faster with 8 consecutive tasks than it does with 4. For larger projects, compilation times take minutes or more. SSD is not of much help after files have been cached once to the RAM.

Depends on your toolset as well. I tend to use Netbeans for Java, and it does auto-compile on save, so there's little benefit unless you do a full rebuild of your project. Edit: Assuming that Netbeans even does multithread compiles... I've never checked.

For C & C++, at least on MSVC by default it only uses one core for compilation. The multithread compile option requires you to turn off minimal rebuild and precompiled headers, so it isn't necessarily better.

Netbeans itself is multi-core aware, it will read your projects faster, you will see that in CPU utilization during IDE load. C/C++ module needs number of jobs set up.